40min, HD, color, 6 channels.

deCapitu is an audiovisual collaboration between composer Rodolfo Valente and filmmaker Alexandre Charro. This work is inspired in Capitu, character from the novel Dom Casmurro (1899), by Brazilian famous writer Machado de Assis. It comprises of six audiovisual chapters and an acousmatic intermezzo. However tempting, deCapitu does not try to depict the romantic misadventure of Bento and Capitolina, a much too familiar plot for Brazilian readers. In turn, it confronts us with a voice that has been silenced over more than a century by a suspect male narrator, by which we’ve long been charmed. His sweet good fellow’s talking made us accomplices of a narrative construction that borders paranoid perversion, convincing us the female character is the only one to blame for his misfortune. So any accusatory attitude is here to be avoided. In the novel, a supposed “betrayal” remains unproved and full of fantasy, but its punishment is concrete, with no appeal or right to a defense: Capitu ends the novel in forced exile, dead and buried in Switzerland. Thus, the choice of deCapitu is to embody the voice of this character which fights against the only thing she knows for sure: that her defeat is implicit in the game rules.